Dirt is under my fingernails, I'm stomping fertilizer–clacking my boots by the door at the end of the day. According to our program curriculum, the Laidlaw Scholars Cornell Cohort spent six weeks this past summer living in two Ecuadorian host communities: the Amazonian community of Mushullakta and the Andean community of Pintag-Amaru. As we traveled across other regions and communities, we learned about ancestral connections to land, language, and culture. Outside of our leadership curricula, my Leadership in Action experience (LIA) this summer taught me how to live a purposeful life in relation to the world and to the various communities around me. This summer, I rehearsed working with my hands and alongside other people, and I exited my Leadership In Action project (LIA) with knowledge and sentiments that expand far beyond the program's initial leadership development objectives. In Ecuador, I found resolutions to many of the questions I was reflecting on before the trip, I observed transformative similarities and differences to my own spaces, I learned how to think through questions with emotional and physical parts of my body, I broadened my understanding of my Clifton strengths, and I broadened my interest in other intellectual leadership styles like consensus decision making. As I reflect on my experience in Ecuador, I find myself less concerned with the process of leading a team and more concerned with how to live a purposeful life in relation to those around me.
Prior to the LIA trip, there were a lot of relationships I wanted to deepen and questions I wanted to explore during this experience. My leadership environment is primarily the political organizing space. My personal leadership context in the United States was an important framing for the trip, and altered the ways I was changed by the program and by the people around me. Before my Leadership In Action Experience, I struggled with questions relevant to my political community, especially questions relating to political repression. How do I lead with radical trust and love in environments that try to hurt and tear apart my community? Coming into this program, I knew the questions I sought to answer and showed up to spaces both as myself and as a representative of my spaces back home. During the program, I continued taking Zoom meetings and writing agendas from the Amazon, the Andes, and on the bus. The integration of my LIA activities and my work in the states was an extremely vital part of my experience and was part of the way I implemented discoveries I was experiencing directly into my leadership practice.
One aspect of the LIA that greatly transformed me was being invited into spaces where communities and community members make their decisions. I noticed many similarities and differences between the host communities and my own spaces. For example, in Mushullakta, I recognized places that revolved around collective imagination that were similar to my own community. Mushullakta is a subsistence-farming community in the temperate zone between the Andes and the Lower Ecuadorian Amazon. Every morning, community members wake up at 3 am to prepare ceremonial, household-grown Guayusa tea. The early hours before breakfast and sunrise are spent interpreting dreams from the night before, and every two weeks, the entire community comes together for a communal Guayusa (or Guayusapina in Quichua), where they make decisions, do report-backs, and develop plans for the Forest School, a pre-collegiate school for children in the community. In these discussions by firelight, I recognized my own decision-making space where dreams, passions, and action come together in a collective event. I saw people who cared for one another, cared about their shared goals, and found consensus on how to move forward together. There were also other moments in Ecuador when I perceived stark and transformative differences from my normal contexts. In Pintag-Amaru, an indigenous collective in the Andes on the outskirts of Quito, we learned about sustainable construction and helped layer clay onto a new kitchen fireplace. I was amazed by how much improvisation was embraced and baked into the construction process. For example, within the unfinished walls, there were already different art installations built. Though big sections of the floor had not been finished, big murals had already been painted. The fun, flexible decision-making process and the project itself inspired me to infuse improvisation and joy into my own decision-making spaces and processes. My intentions before the trip enabled me to interpret these environments with both familiarity and newness. Overall, the lessons in similarity and difference produced many instances of dissonance and resolution. As a human, student, and community member, I feel greatly expanded and different from who I was when I entered this trip.
In terms of skills development, I learned how to make decisions contemplating my physical body and heart rather than solely my head. The mentors who shared their homes, meals, and work with me taught me this skill, which was articulated to me as ‘embodied knowledge.’ Throughout Ecuador, my mentors taught me how systems of knowledge were extremely based on one's own experiences and, therefore, are malleable. I began to see my leadership and my development as a set of skills honed within my body and soul rather than matured in academic environments or my intellectual brain. One concept we talked about frequently in our group was the idea of knowledge systems. In Western society, especially in an elite, career-oriented university, we often prioritize the systems of knowledge relating to academia or experience in professional contexts. During the summer, I practiced making decisions equally using my emotions and physical sensations rather than my head and reasoned logic. Throughout my time in Ecuador, I slowly gained an understanding of ‘embodied knowledge’ and learned to view it as a skill I can practice and rehearse.
A specific activity where I practiced this shift in decision-making was after our cohort completed the Toxic Tour in Lago Agria, a town in the Lower Ecuadorian Amazon. We were led for the day by Donald, a lead organizer of La Unión de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco (UDAPT); a union that has been fighting the petroleum industry in Ecuador since the 1970s. During the Toxic Tour, we traveled to several petroleum mining sites and saw the destruction Texaco (Chevron) had caused and the waste they purposely left behind. I remember it being an emotionally heavy day and I remember afterward standing in a circle with Daniel, one of the lead program coordinators, who told us: “Right now, we aren’t going to comment on what we have seen; rather, we are going to feel a commitment to this place and this issue.” For me, choosing to actively feel during this draining moment rather than think was one of my watershed moments this summer. Our time with UDAPT was one of many experiences where my leadership and personal transformations were taking place. My default instinct in challenging moments is no longer to strategize, run through all different possibilities, and move quickly, but instead to reflect upon the whole state of affairs, on my feelings, and especially on the feelings of others. I no longer digest leadership as a particular role I fit into within a particular space. Leadership and its relevance to me is an ongoing check-in with myself and my community. My mentors in Ecuador shared knowledge and taught me life lessons in these embodied ways. I learned about my life by learning how to feel commitments, learning how to find ripe cocoa beans on the trees, and learning how to create the correct consistency of fertilizer. I cannot express any coherent reflection about my time in Ecuador without crediting all that I learned to the incredible people and facilitators who continue to put their care into the Pachaysana project and into purposeful community life.
Another example of feeling my shift towards embodied knowledge was my Critical Moment Dialogue (CMD), which was a moment in Lago Agria, eating dinner with organizers at the UDAPT office, right after the heavy Toxic Tour. Before dinner, Donald spoke to us of his endless fight against the petroleum industry and its enduring disastrous effects in Lago Agria and the greater Lower Amazon. Soon after he stopped talking, without realizing it, I found myself in tears, and began to emotionally break down. I started completely sobbing and quickly stepped out to keep face. I didn’t know exactly what I was upset about or why my reaction was so severe, but the emotions came first, and I made no attempt to intellectualize what was happening. Myra, one of the community members from Mushullakta whom I was close to and loved dearly, soon noticed I was missing and came out to find me. I cried for a long time in her arms. She went back and brought me a plate of food. After eating, she asked me what was wrong, but my Spanish didn’t make any sense, and there was nothing clear I could communicate. I walked back to the group, tears wet on my face. My friends, rather than ask me what was going on, just hugged me and then sat with me. Embodied knowledge in that moment was that I knew I could be vulnerable; I didn’t need to know what I was feeling or how to express it either. My response to Donald's struggle came from my body. Myra and my other friends knew that and similarly responded to me in that way. There was no need for words; we felt it together, and that was all that was needed.
Aside from emotional and spiritual development, my time in Ecuador also rejuvenated my intellectual curiosity and opened new doors. The other notable transformation I located from my LIA was a better understanding of my strengths and weaknesses and fruitful new engagement with leadership concepts, such as the process for consensus decision-making. My top Clifton strength is Connectedness, which is greatly connected to processes like consensus decision-making. I did my Laidlaw interview and academic research on consensus decision-making. For this, I interviewed lifelong political organizer C.T. Butler, who was one of the founding members of Food Not Bombs. He wrote two books on consensus, one was an explanation and a deep dive into the concept of consensus, and the other one a consensus facilitation handbook. During our interview, CT Butler shared that he was not the creator or editor of the consensus framework but rather studied and wrote down the decision-making process he had grown up around in Quaker activist spaces and indigenous groups in the 1960s. Consensus decision-making is when a group gets together, decides on mutual values, and uses those mutual values as the basis for which decisions are made. Proposals are created, written up, and eventually ‘achieve consensus’ at different times and meetings set aside to discuss concerns, strengths, and alternatives. I noticed that consensus decision-making as a process combined all of the Clifton strengths that were in my top 5: being connected, facilitating, empathizing, being restorative, and having strong guiding beliefs. Early on, I was drawn to consensus decision-making because of its emphasis on connectedness. After my LIA in Ecuador, I had spent so much time feeling in Ecuador that I came to this concept with redoubled energy and looked at my skills much more comprehensively than I had before. Additionally, I recognized that patience and making decisions over a period of time were something that would help me in the next stage of my ongoing leadership development. These observations inspired me to examine my Clifton strengths as a resource that can tie together my understandings of consensus and leadership, and similar to C.T., observe how consensus already plays a role in my life.
My LIA transformed me, and ultimately taught me that everything I needed in the first place already exists within the people around me and within myself. Intellectually, I found a better comprehensive understanding of leadership concepts baked into my Clifton strengths and in consensus decision-making. Emotionally, I saw the ways decolonization was actualized in community-building projects, art, and meals with my host family. Internally, I quite frankly remembered how to be a human being. Broadly, I recognized that leadership has always been important; but only within a larger context that involves other people. Succinctly, I learned that leadership is a feeling, and a moment, and it's held in dynamic intentional connection with my personal life, and with my community. In all, I learned it's the mix of all these influences that creates real magic, that creates substance, that creates a leader, and that creates me.